Official iCreate Blog > XBox

If anyone cares about the plight of the piece of scrap metal I bought from Microsoft (XBox 360 for those who didn’t read my earlier post). I made it work again. 

How did I do this? Did I fold under the pressure, void the warranty and open the case to fix it? No. I did what any self respecting Apple fan would do when confronted with a piece of hardware from Redmond - I gave the thing an almighty punch. 


I’m not kidding, I hit the thing so hard it made my knuckles red and suddenly the whirring noises stopped and it could read discs again. It’s true, Microsoft hardware hasn’t progressed much further than the typewriter when it comes to crucial updates and quick fixes. As far as an entertainment platform goes, my XBox 360 is the jukebox at Arnold’s and I’m the Fonze (Check out some old Happy Days episodes if you don’t catch my drift).  


Talking of Microsoft incompetence, what’s this I see? A “Critical” update to Microsoft Office 2008 for Mac? Surely not.


Not only was Microsoft the last of the major players to release an Intel-native version of its software for Mac (probably due to the giant delay-fest that was the disappointing Windows Vista) when it finally does deliver the product, it needs to bash out an update to prevent applications from quitting unexpectedly or stopping responding.






Once again, hats off to Steve Ballmer, Bill Gates and the rest, you’ve brought us yet another half-baked, unfinished product. What would we do without you? 
 
 

I admit it. I bought an XBox 360.

Well come on, until Apple really goes for it and launches a games console (not the Pippin!) I didn’t have much choice. I had a Wii for a while (because it seemed the most Apple-esque choice) but it didn’t quite cut it against the next-gen breed. 

So…I’ve had this Microsoft product in my home for a fortnight now. All has been good and, I hate to say it, I’ve enjoyed using it. I bought the top of the line Elite model and a bunch of games and, despite it looking like a VCR or some kind of high tech shoebox, things have been fine.Today I come home looking to settle down for a quick game of Call of Duty and what happens… the disc drive is emitting some kind of buzzing sound and no game can be read. I knew the last 14 days had been too good to be true.

Online I hop and, lo and behold, literally hundreds of people have had this problem if not thousands. Apparently it’s my fault. I should have made sure my XBox was kept cool and rested on its side!

What the @$%&!? 

There are some things I don’t need to be warned about. I know the coffee in my cup is hot and I know that smoking kills.What I didn’t know was that if you position an XBox in one of the ways it’s built to sit/stand it will break. I also didn’t know that if you allow an XBox to heat up to anything close to room temperature, it’ll break.

So Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer is sitting out in Vegas at the moment complaining that the MacBook Air is too heavy, he’s moaning about the iPhone price, always dissing Apple. Ok Steve, at least when Apple brings a product to market, “It just works”. The bastard child of Sloth from The Goonies and an albatross can blindly tout Vista as a revolution and Windows Mobile as groundbreaking but can he honestly say that any of his products really face up to actual use and tests of functionality?

I’ve had a MacBook for two years. No faults. An iMac which I’ve had fixed once in 5 years of ownership and an iPhone thats been dropped, knocked and had a cigarette put out on its screen and it still works, still looks great. All of the above run Mac OS X by the way. Any problems with that? No. Even after upgrading to the latest OS which (unlike Microsoft’s effort is better than the previous version).

I’ve had an XBox less than half a month and its stopped working.

Another admission: I’ve owned an XBox before. The original model. What happened to it? The drive broke. Then the HD. Then some kind of video fault developed. All within one year.

I’m the idiot here. I naively thought that, as much as its operating system is a pile of the proverbial, Microsoft had its games devision nailed and would certainly have been committed to more stable hardware after many issues with the original XBox model. Man was I wrong.Knock it together, fire it out to the masses, pay the price when a huge percentage of the products fail.

The guy who sold me my XBox tried to push me onto a PS3, citing the “hundreds” of returns he’d been plagued with since he began stocking the XBox 360. I wish I’d listened to him. I wish I’d taken his advice, given my money to another company that cares about the end user, cares about products standing the test of time and cares about quality.As we well know, Microsoft is not a company on that list. 

I’m the sucker for thinking things couldn’t possibly get any worse.

So, to Evil Steve (Ballmer): Screw you, your stupid dancing antics, your sweating and your mangled vocal chords.

To Good Steve (Jobs): It’s time to bring out yet another device to shame the morons at Microsoft.